Put Up or Shut Up!

That applies to us as much as any other actors in the democracy reform space.

We thought it would be useful (and fun!) to find a way to take statements like, “Well, I just think we’d be better off doing it this way…” and turning them into testable hypotheses.

The relevant question is:

What is the strongest case that democratic reformers should continue to give priority to your present theory of change rather than redirect substantial effort toward implementing the Straight-Up Plan?

A steelman answer should:

  1. Identify the principal bottleneck that prevents democratic government;

  2. Explain the causal mechanism by which the proposed strategy overcomes that bottleneck;

  3. Show why success does not depend upon first obtaining reforms from the institutions or powerholders responsible for the problem;

  4. Explain why transferring continuing legislative control to voters is unnecessary, premature, inferior, or unacceptably dangerous;

  5. Compare the proposal with Straight-Up under the same questions and standards;

  6. Identify the evidence or results that would justify abandoning or revising the present strategy.

The challenge is not to prove that the existing work is valuable. Many reforms are valuable. The challenge is to explain why that work should retain strategic priority when a practical route to transferring legislative power to voters has been placed on the table.

The Where-do-we-go-from-here Challenge

When it comes to Straight Up and other democracy reform efforts, you may be tempted to think, “Isn’t there room for everyone?” But democratic reform has limited money, labor, leadership, public attention, and time. Every organization and reform tradition necessarily makes choices about where the next volunteer hour, donated dollar, public argument, and institutional investment should go. So there is a real opportunity cost associated with going down the wrong path.

And the assumption is that democracy reform efforts are all complementary paths headed in the same direction. While this is true of some efforts, it is definitely not true of all of them. One tactic may undermine another. For instance, efforts to prop up and improve the legacy system are anathema to the Straight-Upper. There are other examples. So it does matter whether those of us dreaming of a certain democratic future find a shared vision of, not just what that future looks like, but how to get there.

Do you believe another approach offers a stronger path to democracy? We invite democracy reformers, scholars, organizers, and defenders of existing representative institutions to submit the strongest version of the model they actually advocate—not a version constructed for them by DSUp. Each competing approach will be defined in a versioned Model Card stating its core proposition, principal mechanisms, decision locus, permitted supporting rules, evidence claims, and known limitations. Competing models will then face the same randomly selected questions, response limits, evidence standards, evaluators, and scoring criteria. Models may be revised as their advocates learn, but every revision will be recorded so that no approach can change shape after seeing the question. New models, hybrid models, and direct challenges to Straight-Up are all welcome. The only price of admission is clarity!

Email us at DemocracyStraightUp@gmail.com to get started.